The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier

_The Pathan Unarmed:  Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier_ by Mukulika Banerjee
Santa Fe, NM:  School of American Research Press, 2000
ISBN0-933452-69-1

(44)  This left the remaining districts of Mardan and Peshawar to bear the bulk of the increased taxes;  in the 1930s these were to be the central strongholds of Khudai Khidmatgar support.

(56)  More specifically, Badshah Khan had come to the conclusion that their activities so far had not "bred a sufficient sense of self-sacrifice" that was needed for a fully committed nationalist struggle.  Reflecting on the experiences of his earlier life, he felt that the solution to both his current political problem of promoting a unified nationalist struggle in the Frontier and his ongoing practical concerns about improving education and living standards lay in the cultivation of a greater sense of _service_ in Pathan society....

By early 1930, the KK strength was around 1,000 volunteers.

(60)  Having been little more than 1,000 at the start of 1930, KK membership was estimated at some 25,000 by the end of 1931....
NB:  Kissa Khasai massacre at Utmanzai

His approach was quite different, therefore, from the sudden call to arms of a charismatic leader.  As Sarfaraz Mazim said:  "Badshah Khan first told the people the facts of British rule and explained the situation to them.  Then he led them.  It was not the other way around.  He did not expect them to follow automatically."

(61)  Noor Akbar recalled that:  "Again and again Badshah Khan told us that the British could be removed without any violence if the Pathans could only unite."

(62)  "We did not know before that the British were ruling us.  The mullahs and khans were in the pay of the British so they never told people the truth.  No one in the whole Frontier had the spirit or the guts to speak against the British other than Badshah Khan."

(63)  "It was some time before 1930.  I heard Badshah Khan talk about reform in our mosque.  He said that in order to get rid of those [the British] who were in land that was not theirs, we first had to reform our ways.  He said that he needed volunteers to help him in this task.  He said that he had nothing to offer, no salary or money. What he wanted was not very many people;  but at least one man who would be honest and willing to serve the people.  Therefore I joined the movement by vowing my allegiance to Badshah Khan."

(68)  The motivation for joining the KK movement, therefore, was not a single, articulated, nationalist zeal but rather reflected a mixture of views and responses to social pressures. This variety, however, was very much a strength, since it meant that there were a number of criteria by which the movement could benchmark its own progress and success.  In this respect it differed significantly from the earlier violent movements in the Frontier, which were of a more millenarian character.  Premised on a single grand aim of salvation from the British infidel and the establishment of a religious utopia, such uprisings could not fulfill these magical promises and their leaders found their support quickly dwindled away.  The varied social, political and material aims of the KKs, on the other hand, if more modest, were also far more likely to bring tangible and positive results.

(73)  The wider Red Shirt membership was far larger, however, and the Governor reported that over 50,000 "would call themselves Red Shirts" [by 1938]

(83)  With the intra-KK marriages, however, equality came to be demonstrated not through extravagant bride price, which Badshah Khan had long criticized, but rather through shared participation in the KK and the exchange of political camaraderie.
NB:  Opium as a way to earn the bride price in Afghanistan today

(86)  In its emphasis upon the combination of self-reform, grace and discipline, the KK had more in common with the Salvation Army than it did with the British Army. Like the Salvation Army, the KK was based on voluntary work and service, yet also prized virtues such as discipline and efficient organisational machinery.

(93)  A very important aspect of the civil disobedience movement was its boycott of institutions of the colonial state, notably the courts, police, army, tax offices, and officers, and schools.  Such non-cooperation was practised in a variety of ways.
NB:  Flag marches, picketing liquor and foreign clothing shops

(97)  As Mohammed PIr Sher Shah emphasized, "We did party work only one or two days of the week.  The rest of the time we had to work on our lands."  People recalled with gratitude the fact that when Badshah Khan went around villages and wanted to talk to farmers working in the fields, he used to make his escorts plough the land so that the farmers could sit and talk to him without losing valuable time.

(98)  Amazingly Grana had said to me:  "You will see in the British records that you are reading in England mention of a little boy who once stood up and addressed a meeting.  That was my son, Qasim Khan."  Deputing a little boy to read out the resolutions at a meeting was a standard solution to the problem of women otherwise having to keep purdah in front of Badshah Khan or another adult male speaker.  Badshah Khan's speech-by-proxy urged women to show solidarity with the nationalist struggle by wearing khadi and by assisting their men in the non-violent civil disobedience.  His emphasis on shari'a law was specifically related to his long-time support for proper women's inheritance rights, which the Quran prescribes but which Pathan tradition neglected.  Badshah Khan had also long argued the importance of educating women as part of ensuring a healthy society.

(100)  In his [Badshah Khan's] 1945 article, however, he put caution aside and made an unequivocal statement in favour of women's participation:  "We cannot stop people from spreading propaganda against us and that will continue for the next twenty years.  There is no point in waiting that long, for whenever we allow women to participate in our movement people will always talk." 

(122)  At this point in our rather tense dialogue, Sarfaraz Khan interjected:  "We did carry sticks and we hot-headed Pathans used to throw stones when we were pushed too hard, too far... especially the bereaved women of murdered KKs.  But we had tried to learn patience.  After all, even the Quran says that 'War should be one of Patience.'" 

(123)  Lieutenant Muhammad Wali remembered his ribs being broken by the police at a riot but "even then I did not resort to violence.  We removed the British by our patience. Non-violence gives a strength of mind."

(126)  Badshah Khan stated in his speeches that "it is unselfish public service, and not a red shirt, that makes a Khudai Khidmatgar."  As he often remarks in his autobiography, however, the only way of convincing Pathans of anything is by example, and so he travelled and lived among the rural population of the Frontier as one of them.  Mohammed Yakub Khan told me:

"Badshah Khan came to this area again and again to convince people of non-violence.  He lived by example... when he used to visit he was never a burden on anyone.  He was like a faqir, he carried his own food with him and he ate only dry bread...  people who went with him had to carry their own food too... usually just a little gur and channa [chickpeas and unrefined sugar].  He ate once a day.  If anyone offered him more than one course he declined it.

More of my notes from readings about Abdul Ghaffar Khan:
Ghaffar Khan: Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns
https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/01/ghaffar-khan-nonviolent-badshah-of.html

My Life and Struggle by Badshah Khan
https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/01/my-life-and-struggle-by-badshah-khan.html

Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan, a Man to Match His Mountains
https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/01/nonviolent-soldier-of-islam-badshah.html

Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan, a Man to Match His Mountains

Nonviolent Soldier of Islam:  Badshah Khan, a Man to Match His Mountains by Eknath Easwaran
Tomales, CA:  Nilgiri Press, 1984/1999
ISBN 1-888314-01-x

(108)  For the poet Khushal Khan, as for all Pathans, autumn rather than spring brings renewal.  Then the sun dips south toward the Arabian sea, the air from the passes cools, wedges of geese float over from the Central Asian plateau, the poplars and willows turn amber - and Pathan blood stirs.

(145)  Gaffar Khan on why he never knew whether his brother's wife had accepted Islam or not:
...not one in a hundred thousand knows the true spirit of Islam.  I think at the back of our quarrels is the failure to recognize that all faiths contain enough inspiration for their adherents.  The Holy Koran says in so many words that God sends messengers for all nations and peoples.  All of them are Ahle Kitab -"Men of the Book" - and the Hindus are no less Ahle Kitab than Jews and Christians.

(146)  During his tour he saw the real significance of Gandhi's insistence on spinning.  Where villagers spun, they had enough to eat;  where they did not, they starved.

(171)  Ghani [Gaffar's son] asked Murtaza how nonviolence could have become the creed of a former outlaw.  The plainspoken reply offers an insight into the dynamics of satyagraha, soul force, which taps the hidden potential of the human spirit.  "I was a little saint for those four years [he was a commander of the Khudai Khidmatgars]," he told Ghani.  "I tried to live up to my dreams instead of my desires.  It was great, it was a miracle.  I refused fortunes for a hope and spared lovely girls because they trusted me and looked up to me."  In his unintended way, Murtaza reveals the infectious power of nonviolence - love in action.  "You cannot help loving those that love you," he told Ghani, "and you cannot hurt those that trust you.  I tried to live up to what the people thought I was."  Thus the grizzled outlaw went to prison again - but this time as a "servant of God" in the cause of his people's freedom.

(186)  Counting from 1910, with the opening of his first school in Utmanzai, Badshah Khan went on serving, reforming, and resisting tyranny for almost eighty years.  I cannot imagine finding anywhere in the world's history a life of more unbroken service in the cause of freedom.

Despite his thirty years in jail [held in both British and Pakistani prisons] - the equivalent of every third day of his life - Badshah Khan never ceased to stand by the principles of love and service with which he began his mission.  As one biographer wrote, "He will not bend."  Through all the suffering and setbacks, he remained a dedicated servant of God, compassionate, forgiving, and resilient - and as dogged as ever.

(194)  [after the Kaira action of 1918, why Gandhi recruited for the British military]  
This was not Gandhi's idea of nonviolence.  True nonviolence did not issue from weakness but from strength.  It was a matter of the powerful voluntarily withholding their power in a conflict, choosing to suffer for the sake of a principle rather than inflict suffering - even though they could.  Gandhi called this the "nonviolence of the strong," as opposed to the "nonviolence of the weak" that he had found in his Kaira peasants.  "My creed of nonviolence is an extremely active force," he insisted.  "It has no room for cowardice or even weakness."

(197)  Satya means truth in Sanskrit, and agraha comes from a Sanskrit root meaning "to hold on to," which Gandhi used as a synonym for "force."  Thus satyagraha carries a double meaning:  it signifies a determined holding on to, a _grappling_ with truth;  while at the same time it implies the forces that arises from that grappling, what Gandhi called"soul-force."  Satyagraha stands for both the means and the ends, the struggle and the force that is generated in that struggle.

As heat is generated by friction, Gandhi contended, power is released from within the depths of the human spirit in its struggle toward truth.  The raw material for this power is passion.  "I have learned through bitter experience," Gandhi explained, "the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world."  In this "truth-struggling" nothing is lost or repressed;  energy is conserved and transmuted.  Thus in its transformative aspect nonviolence is not nonviolence at all, but violence transmuted, harnessed, _used_.  We could more properly call it _trans_violence, where the power of passions like anger, hatred, and fear is reshaped into a potent fighting force.

(263)  _My Life and Struggle_ by Abdul Ghaffar Khan
Delhi:  Hind Pocket Books, 1969

_Abdul Ghaffar Khan:  Faith Is a Battle_ by DG Tendulkar
Bombay:  Gandhi Peace Foundation (Popular Prakashan), 1967


More of the notes on my readings about Abdul Ghaffar Khan
Ghaffar Khan: Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns
https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/01/ghaffar-khan-nonviolent-badshah-of.html

My Life and Struggle by Badshah Khan
https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/01/my-life-and-struggle-by-badshah-khan.html

The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier

https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-pathan-unarmed-opposition-and.html

_My Life and Struggle_ by Badshah Khan

_My Life and Struggle_ by Badshah Khan
Delhi, India:  Hind Pocket Books, 

(14)  He was Hafiz Koran, knew Koran by heart, by the time he was 8 and had madrassa schooling

(49)  A Hijrat Committee was formed in Peshawar and anyone who wanted to migrate to Afghanistan had to go through this committee, which provided him with all kinds of facilities and comforts.  In the beginning the Britsh tried to stop people from going on hijrat to Afghanistan, but later, when they found that people would not listen to them they changed their tune and encouraged people to go on hijrat in large numbers.

(61)  When he had gone I threw the pieces of gur out of the window and there and then I made a resolution that as long as I was in jail I would never do anything against the rules and regulations, because it created fear in a man's heart.  I had seen it happen to many of my political friends.  First they violate the rules, then they flatter the jailor.  They have to even bribe him.  All this is caused by fear and it costs a man his self-respect.  I did not want that to happen to me.

(86)  I replied:  "I have not come here to see relics, I have come here to look for the patience and courage of the Holy Prophet, who braved the journey through the desert from Mecca and came here for the welfare of the people of Taif.  And how did the people of Taif receive him?  They threw stones at him, set their dogs at him and beat him.  But in spite of all this cruelty the Prophet did not despair of the people, but he prayed for them saying:  'Oh God, be Thou their Guide and show them Thy ways.'"

(160)  I should mention here, that when the Jirga was discussing whether to start civil disobedience or not, Haji Faqir Khan of Hazara proposed that we should cut telephone wires, or remove railway sleepers.  I told the Jirga that this would be allowed only on the condition that the saboteur himself went to the police and told them what he had done.  This would make him develop moral courage and this would be an inspiration to other workers.  Also, no innocent people would come under suspicion and the police would have no excuse for hunting and harrassment.  So this mass movement was started, according to my instructions and carried out with great discipline on the part of the workers.

(174)  After all we did not want to win the elections or form a ministry for the sake of ruling over people, but for the sake of serving them.

(195)  My religion is truth, love, and service to God and humanity.

(230)  The student said:  "Suppose the German [a visitor to Afghanistan] asks me why we do not have these sentiments of fellowship and brotherhood, what shall I say?"

I told him:  "The answer is that in other countries there are people who have sacrificed their own comfort and happiness, their lives and property for the sake of their country and people.  There are no such people in our country, and if by chance there are a few people like that somewhere, we call them infidels and Wahabis."

More notes on my readings about Abdul Ghaffar Khan
Ghaffar Khan: Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns
https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/01/ghaffar-khan-nonviolent-badshah-of.html

Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan, a Man to Match His Mountains
https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/01/nonviolent-soldier-of-islam-badshah.html

The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier

https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-pathan-unarmed-opposition-and.html

Ghaffar Khan: Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns

_Ghaffar Khan:  Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns_ by Rajmohan Gandhi
New Delhi:  Viking Penguin, 2004

(ix) Asfandyar Khan, eldest son of Badshah Khan's second son and a political activist

(38)  A mullah who had taught Ghaffar, when the boy was five or six, to recite the Qur'an could not explain its verses to Ghaffar because he himself did not know their meaning;  he knew, however, how to hit pupils.

(47)  Ghaffar Khan's sentiment for the Wigram brothers notwithstanding, he seems to have envisioned, as did the Haji of Turangzai, schools that would promote not only reform among the Pakhtuns - the ending of feuds and of wasteful expenditure on weddings and funerals - but also autonomy vis-a-vis the British.  These would be azad madrassas, independent Islamic schools.

(61)  To Ghaffar Khan he [Behram Khan] said, 'What the others are not doing, you should not do.  Sit comfortably at home.'  'If others stop offering namaaz', the son replied, 'would you want me to stop it too?' 'Of course not,' siad the father.  'Well, Father,' said Badshah Khan, 'My schools are like offering prayer.'

(84-85)  This commitment to nonviolence, which was new and significant in the public life of the Frontier province, did not however erase the facts that the KKs had emerged in direct consequence of the forceful crushing, led by Pakhtuns, of a non-Pakhtun attempt to seize the throne in Kabul.  In the words of a critical Pakistani admirer of Badshah Khan, 'a violent event in Kabul was celebrated in a nonviolent setting in Utmanzai, giving birth to a nonviolent movement.'

(86)  The 1930 salt defiance, which caught the world's imagination, was nowhere more resolute than in the Frontier.

(97)  The noticeable role of Pakhtun women in the 1930-31 movement (among the women addressing meetings were the sisters of the Khan brothers) was connected to that movement's nonviolence. 

(103)  The Khan brothers grew close also to the Bajaj family, hosts in Wardha to Gandhi and his guests, and to Mahadev Desai, Gandhi's secretary.  Desai drew the brothers out on their lives and soon produced, to the advantage of contemporaries and future researchers a valuable little book, _Two Servants of God_.

(120)  A remark made in Bannu revealed the relationship in Gandhi's mind between the spinning wheel and nonviolence.  'God whispered into my heart', said Gandhi, 'If you want to work through nonviolence, you have to proceed with small things.'  A week later, addressing Khudai Khidmatgars in the town of Tank in Dera Ismail Khan district, Gandhi offered an observation that would be quoted often in the future:

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

(158)  Besides cash and guns, the British used Islam.  The Raj's records, including, for example, the diaries of George Cunningham, who occupied key positions in the Frontier, are frank about the paid employment of religious leaders from the Settled Districts for influencing the tribal chiefs, in the name of Islam, against Russia, Germany and supposedly 'Hindu' movements for Indian independence.

(173)  In March and April peace committees were formed by KKs (and in some cases by Ahrars and Khaksars) all over the province, mainly to protect non-Muslims. Charged with involvement in rioting, thousands of Leaguers were arrested. [1947]

(190)  Recalling this interview in 1965, Badshah Khan said that he told Jinnah that if three conditions were met the Pathans could happily join Pakistan.  One, the terms had to be honourable.  Two, the Pathans of the Settled Districts and the tribal areas should have the right to opt out of Pakistan if the latter, after independence, stayed as a British dominion. Three, all matters concerning tribal people should be settled by the Pathans without the interference or domination of non-Pathans.

(203)  Mercifully the Frontier was spared large-scale communal riots in August and September, thanks in part to the role the KKs played.  'Despite their desertion by the [All-India Congress], the Khudai Khidmatgars still held strength in the province and ... protected the lives and property of the non-Muslims in the NWFP.' [1947]

(206)  Jinnah asked Badshan Khan to join the Muslim League.  Ghaffar Khan said he found it hard to join a body whose members had only recently looted the properties of Hindus and Sikhs.  'Surely there were exceptions - some who did not loot', Jinnah said.  ' Yes,' Badshah Khan agreed, 'those who did not get an opportunity.'

(229)  In less than a year, however on 9 May 1958, Dr Khan Sahib was knifed to death in the house in Lahore of his eldest son, Sadullah Khan, an engineer working for the government.  The assassin, apparently a speaker of Punjabi or Seraiki, found Dr Khan Sahib in the veranda, stabbed him near the groin, and ran.  He was chased by the seventy-six-year old victim, by two Alsatians in the house, and by a driver, and was caught, but old Dr Khan Sahib, struck in a vital artery, bled to his death.   Although after a trial the assassin was hanged, his motive and possible links to any others were never clearly brought out.

(240)  We may note here that a Pakhto song written by Ghani Khan, 'Ay zama watana ('O homeland mine), would become Afghanistan's national anthem.

(242)  The Prophet said, belief in God [means] to love one's own fellowmen...  My people are drowning before my eyes and to save them I shall grasp any helping hand, be it the hand of a Hind or an infidel.

I was called Hindu by those who used to pick crumbs from British tables.  [from Badshah Khan's Pakhtunistan Day speeches, 1965 - 1967]

(247)  On 24 November, addressing a joint session of both houses of Parliament, Ghaffar Khan was franker still:  'Your revenue is from taxes and duties on liquor.  You are forgetting Gandhi the way you forgot the Buddha.'

(248)  To India's Muslims, he recommended non-retaliation, in the name of the Qur'an:  'If you plant a slap after having been provoked by a slap, then what is the difference between the followers of the Qur'an and the evildoer?'

(251)  A gory struggle ensued and an independent Bangladesh emerged in 1971-72.  Yahya Khan resigned, Bhutto became the ruler of a truncated Pakistan, and the National Awami Party founded by Badshah Khan and led since 1967 by his son Wali Khan won a share of power in the NWFP and Balochistan.  Taizi claims that some tribal jirgahs called on Badshah Khan in Kabul, to fight for an independent Pakhtunistan if supplied with arms.  According to Taizi, neither Badshah Khan nor Zahir Shah encouraged them.

(252)  Earlier, Bhutto had crafted constitutional changes that made Islam Pakistan's state religion and stipulated that only a Muslim could be the nation's president or prime minister.

(254)  Badshah Khan saw through Zia's Islamism, which was far more glaring than that of Bhutto (who was hanged in 1979).  'Bandookwale namaazi ho gaye hain,' Ghaffar Khan noted:  'The men with guns have become the prayer experts.'

(257)  Afraid that Badshah Khan might die in Kabul, thereby giving the mujahedin a propaganda weapon, Karmal pressed India to accept the old man for treatment.  Indira was willing to oblige Karmal, but 'the highly pragmatic' Badshah Khan named his price:  a meeting with Brezhnev.  To Dixit [Indian ambassador to Kabul] he said:  'Send this message to Indira, and tell her I will only come if she gets me to meet Brezhnev.' [1982]

(258)  'That nation is great which rests its head upon death as a pillow.'  So Gandhi had written, way back in 1909, in _Hind Swaraj_.

(261)  In the summer of 1983, when he was in Pakistan, statements that he and Wali Khan made seemed to link the Soviet entry into Afghanistan to the facilities in the NWFP and Balochistan that Zia's Pakistan was giving to the USA.  Father and son and many other opposition leaders were arrested.  A house of the irrigation department in Khesghi, about eleven miles from Muhammad Naray, was turned into a sub-jail, and the ninety-three-year-old Badshah Khan was detained in it.

(268)  Writing seven years before Badshah Khan's death, the Swedish scholar Jansson identified four 'messages' from his life:  intense Pakhtun nationalism, moral and social reform, nonviolence, and Islam.

(272-273)  His Islam seemed to be of the most natural kind.  When, on his end-1934 arrest in Wardha, which occurred within days of a rare family reunion, he told Jamnalal Bajaj, 'What pleases God pleases me', and left smilingly with his captors, he gave expression to Islam's fundamental tenet of submission to God's will.  If acceptance of God's will is a matter of the heart rather than of the lips, then Badshah Khan's inner obedience over a long and hard lifetime makes him a true and exemplary Muslim.

We saw also that he was a courageous Muslim, unafraid to believe his own honest interpretation of scripture, and unafraid to question voices from Muslim platforms that he felt were using religion for politics or commerce.  Such voices criticized him several times during his long life, including when he and his older brother Jabbar went to Rev Wigram's school, when he started  his own schools, when, alongside Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians, he joined the fight for India's freedom, when he and his brother sent their children to the West for education, when he opposed India's division along religious lines, when he defended Hindus and Sikhs in the Frontier province, when he visited India in 1969-70, and when he opposed the Zia regime in Pakistan...

Again and again he insisted that the Prophet's chief demand of a Muslim was the service of fellow human beings.

(274)  His prison-going and political campaigns limited Ghaffar Khan's exertions for women's empowerment, but his honesty before the Frontier's women - 'Today we are the followers of custom and we oppress you' - was exceptional.

(275)  Noting that Ghaffar Khan 'practised Islam and nonviolence and showed that it was not only for the weak', [Mubarak] Awad started a network called Nonviolence International to promote social change and international peace....

Harold Gould, the American scholar... Ghaffar Khan's life has  a role in the 'radical rethinking by radical Islamists'....

(276)  In 1946, alluding to the potential for fanaticism in the Frontier region, he warned that 'a dangerous situation is fast developing in the tribal areas', and a year later he said, 'I feel it is my duty to warn you against future dangers so that I may justify myself before man and God on the Day of Judgment.'  This was a quintessentially Muslim thought from one whose directness invited charges of apostasy from those made uncomfortable by it.

The naturalness of his Islam, his directness, his rejection of violence and revenge, and his readiness to cooperate with non-Muslims add up to a valuable legacy for our angry times. This legacy may be of help to Muslims and non-Muslims today in the task of overcoming divides between Islam and the West  (and modernity), between Afghanistan and the subcontinent, between Islam and the subcontinent's Hindus, Sikhs and other non-Muslims.  His bridge-building life is a refutation of the clash-of-civilization theory.

But he was also a rock.  No force or threat could shake his stand for Pakhtun dignity, which at bottom was a stand for the freedom and dignity of every human being. The Pakhtuns between the Hindu Kush and the Indus were his first love but also his links to humankind, and we can, if we wish, hear him, even if we are west of that mountain range or east of that river.

(280)  Abdul Ghani Khan, _The Pathans:  a Sketch_  (Islamabad:  Pushto Adabi Society, 1990, p 45)

(283)  Fazal-ur-Rahim Marwat, "Ghani Khan", http://www.geocities.com/khyber007/ghani2.html

(285)  Erland Jansson _India, Pakistan or Pakhtunistan?:  The Nationalist mOvements in the NWFP, 1937-47_  (Uppsala, Sweden:  University of Uppsala, 1981)

(286)  _Ethnicity, Islam and Nationalism:  Muslim Politics in the North-West Frontier Province 1937-47_  Sayed Wiqar Ali Shah (Pakistan:  Oxford Unviersity Press, 1999, p 92)

(287)  Abdul Wali Khan _ Facts Are Sacred_  (Peshawar:  Jaun Publishers, 1991, p 88)

(293)  Pyarelal, _Thrown to the Wolves:  Abdul Ghaffar_  (Calcutta:  Eastlight Book House, 1966, p 133

P S Ramu _Badshah Khan_ (Delhi:  SS Publishers, 1991, p 98-99)

Haribhau Joshi _Badshah Khan_  (Varanasi:  Nagari Prcharini Sabha, 1970)

(297)  Joan V Bondurant _Conquest of Violence:  The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict_  (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1958)

(299)  G L Puri _Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan:  A true Servant of Humanity_ (New Delhi:  Congress Centenary Celebrations Committee, 1985)

(300)  Sher Zaman Taizi _Bacha Khan in Afghanistan:  A Memoir_, June 2002
http://asianreflection.com/khanafghanistan.shtml

Mohammed Yunus _Frontier Speaks _ (Bombay, Hind Kitabs, 1947)

More notes from my readings on Abdul Ghaffar Khan:
My Life and Struggle by Badshah Khan
https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/01/my-life-and-struggle-by-badshah-khan.html


Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan, a Man to Match His Mountains
https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/01/nonviolent-soldier-of-islam-badshah.html

The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier
https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-pathan-unarmed-opposition-and.html

Growing Artificial Societies

_Growing Artificial Societies:  Social Science from the Bottom Up_ by Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell  Brookings Institution Press/MIT Press, 1996  ISBN 0-262-55025-3

(1)  "Another fundamental concern of most social scientists is that the rational actor - a perfectly informed individual with infinite computign capacity and who maximized a fixed (nonevolving) exogenous utility function - bears little relation to a human being."
(7)  "One theme that runs through this entire book is _social connection_."
(10 -11)  "In particular, we find that the carrying capacity of the environment is _increased_ when agents trade.  However, this salutary result does not come free, for under some circumstances trade increases societal inequality."
(11-12)  When  agents have finite lives and the ability to change their preferences - "Nothing like the equilibrium of neoclassical theory emerges.  Of course, the laissez-faire argument is precisely that markets, left to their own devices, allocate goods and services efficiently.  the theoretical ccase for this is the so-called First Theorem of welfare economices,  However, when markets fail to arrive at equilibrium, the First Welfare theorem does not apply and this case for laisez-faire is undermined."
(19)  "The broad aim of this research is _to begin the development of a more unified social science, one that embeds evolutionary processes in a computational environment that simulates demographics, the transmission of culture, conflict, economics, disease, the emergence of groups, and agent coadaptation with an environment, all from the bottom up_.  Artificial society-type models may change the way we think about _explanation_ in the social sciences."
(20)  "Perhaps one dya people will interpret the question, 'Can you explain it?' as asking, 'Can you grow it?'"
(21)  ""Event unfold on a 'sugarscape.'  This is simply a spatial ditribution, or topography, of 'sugar,' a generalized resource that agents must eat to survive.  The space is a two-dimensional coordinate grid or lattice.  At every point (x,y) on the lattice, there is both a sugar level and a sugar capacity, the capacity beign the maximum value the sugar level can take at that point."
(22)  "The sugarscape wraps around from right to left (that is, were you to walk off the screen to the right, you would reappear at the left) and from top to bottom forming a doughnut - techically, a torus."
(23)  "Each agent is characteruzed by a set of fixed and variable states.  For a particular agent, its genetic characteristics are fixed for life while its wealth, for instance, willv ary over time."
"One state of eahc agent is its location ont he sugarscape... One might thing of an agent's initial position as its 'environmental endowment.'"
(23-24)  "Eacha gent had a genetic endowment consisting of a sugar metabolism and a level of vision.  Agents have different values for these genetic attributes;  thus the agent population is _heterogeneous_."
(23)  "All agents are given some initial endowment of sugar, which they carry with them as they move about the sugarscape.  Sugar colected but not eaten - what an agent gathers beyond its metabolism - is added to the agent's holdings.  There is no limit to how much sugar an individual agent may accumulate."
(25)  "The agents are also given a movement rule."
NB:  What if the mirror world is not a real-time updatable model but a simulation matched and tracked by actual data?  Or both?
(26)  "All the ingredients are now in hand.  We have a sugarscape and an initial population of agents, each of whom comes into the world with an environmental and genetic endowment, and we have simple behavioral rules for the sugarscape and the agents.  Initially there will be only one rule for the agents and one for the sugarscape, but in subsequent chapters both the environment and the agents will execute multiple rules."
(33)  "While initially quite symmetrical, the distribution ends up highly skewed.*  Such skewed wealth distributions are produced for wide ranges of agent and environment specifications.  They seem to be characteristic of heterogeneous agents extracting resources from a landscape of fixed capacity.  By contrast, the distribution of _income_, defined as the amount harvested per period less metabolism, is much less skewed.

*"Agents having wealth above the mean frequently have both high vison and low metabolism.  In order to become one of the very wealthiest agents one must also be born high on the sugarscape and live a long life."

"This distribution is our first example of a so-called _emergent structure_."
(35)  "We use the term 'emergent' to denote _stable macroscopic patterns arising from the local interaction of agents_."
"Understanding how simple local rules give rise to collective structure is a central goal of the sciences of complexity."
(36-37)  "The nature of the Gini coefficient or ratio is conveniently explained by reference to the so-called Lorenz curve.  This is a plot of the fraction of total social wealth (or income) owned by a given poorest fraction of the population.  Any unequal distribution of wealth produces a Lorenz curve that lies below the 45 degree line - the poorest X percent of the population controls less than X percent of the society's total wealth.  The Gini ratio is a measure of how much the Lorenz curve departs from the 45 degree line.  If everyone has the same amount of wealth the Gini ratio is zero, while if a single individual owns everything then the Gini ratio is one.  As the Gini coefficient increases society becomes less egalitarian."
(38-39)  ".., the so-caled Van Nreumann enighborhood, defined to be the set of sites immediately to the north, south, east, and west of a particular site....  And alternative is the Moore neighborhood, which includes all four sites of the von Neumann neighborhood as well as the four sites along the diagonals."
(42)  "While these waves seem to quality as emergent structure, the diagonal _direction_ in which they propagate is perhaps even more interesting.  Recall that during a single application of M the _individual_ agent can only move north, south, east, or west.  Yet the collective wave is clearly moving northeast - a heading unavailable to individuals!  On closer examination, the collective northeast direction results from a complete interweaving of agents, none of whom can move in this direction...  Here, the local rule _precludes_ individual behavior mimicking the collective behavior." 
*"In pure cellular automata (CA) models, waves are phenomena of significant interest.  Recently Sato and Iwasa ahve produced these in a CA model of forest ecology. REcent attempts by mathematical biologists to model the wavelike movement of certain mamal herds include Gueron and Levin and Gueron, Levin and Rubenstein.  For an economic model of 'herding' see Kirman."
(48)  "Pollution diffusion rule D:
Each eta time periods and at each site, compute the pollution flux - the average pollutio level over all von Neumann neighboring sites;
Each site's flux becomes its new pollution level.

"The reader with a knowledge of cellular automata (CA) will notice that this rule, which relates the pollution on any site to that on other sites makes the sugarscape a true CA."
(50)  "Subsequently, when diffusion is turned on, the pollution quickly spreads more or less uniformly around the landscape and many agents move back to the regions of highest sugar.  As they continue to gather and metabolize sugar, pollution increases while diffusing over the entire landscape.  There is a kind of rising 'red tide' that diminishes the welfare of all agents still alive on the sugarscape.*

"It turns out that the same type of dynamic pattern appears when the externally involved is positive rather than negative.  Positive externalities - increasing returns or network externalities, for example - give agent reasons to associate with one another, to spatially cluster.  Of course, the two types of externalities can be combined: there may be positive externalities associated with production but negative externalities associated with consumption.  Are cities the 'balance points' between these opposed effects?"
*"It is at this point that a clear 'tragedy of the commons' interpretation of  life on the sugarscape manifests intself.  Metabolisms are constant and so, for a fixed agent population, sugar consumption and the pollution it generates are fixed;  thus, the only way pollution levels can be decreased is to reduce the amount of pollution generated though production (harvesting) activities. if, for instance, those agents who harvest more sugar than they consume in following M were to follow some alternative rule, harvesting only, say, half the sugar they find beyond their metabolic needs, then overall pollution levels would fall.  While this behavioral rule would make these agents worse off, in comparison to M, by lowering their income, perhaps all agents could be made better off through side payments.  Alternative rules - institutions - for managing such common property resource problems in general are investigated at length by Ostrom and Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker."
(51)  "In Chapter III, we introduce combat.  Its intensity can grow when competition for resources becomes severe.  An influx of environmental refugees suddenly  boosts the agent density in the receiving zone and, naturally, competition for sugar intensifies dramatically.  The model suggests, therefore, that _environmental degradation can have serious security implications_."

"Paraphrasing, it amounts to the instruction:  'Look around for the best free site;  go there and harvest the sugar.'  And yet, all sorts of unexpected things emerge from the _interaction_ of these agents:  basic principles like the existence of environmental structures like waves that move in directions unavailable to individuals;  and biological processes like hibernation and migration (refugees).  And that strikes us as surprising.  The nature of the surprise is worth discussing."
(52)  "In short, _it is not the emergent macroscopic object per se that is surprsing, but the generative sufficiency of the simple local rules_."
(52-53)  "The Sugarscape model can function as a kind of _laboratory_ where we 'grow' fundamental social structures _in silico_, thereby learning which micromechanisms are sufficient to generate macrostructures of interest.  Such experiments can lead to hypotheses of societal concern that may subsequently be tested statistically against data."
(63)  "_Sustainable coevolution with one's environment_ is a necessary condition for "fitness,' if we with to retain this term at all."
(68)  "Interestingly, some 'Social Darwinists' oppose wealth transfers _to the poor_ on the ground that the undiluted operation of selective pressures is 'best for the species.'  Conveniently, they fail to mention that intergenerational transfers of wealth _from the rich to their offspring_ dilute those very pressures."
(80-82)  "Networks such as those we have described manifest themselves in the real world in many important ways.  Politically, restrictions on freedom of assembly, freedom of speech (press censorship), and freedom of movement (internal passport requirements) are standard tactics of repressive governments.  The main aim of these measures is to keep individual dissenters - of which there may be a great many - isolated from one another, to keep them from _connecting_ with other dissenters, and so to thwart the emergence of an organized _community_ of dissenters, conscious of their numbers.  how do changing political borders and 'information revolutions' (for example, the Internet) affect the emergence of groups?  How does 'samizdata spread across a landscape?  Artificial societies allow us to study such questions systematically."
(86- 90)  "To complexity scientists, the moral is clear:  When you change local rules you may change emergent collective structures.  For policymakers, there is a corollary:  The most effetive way to alter collective patterns of behavior may be from the bottom upl by modifying local rules."
(95)  "The main issue we address is the extent to which interacting agents are capable of producing _socially optimal_ outcomes, that is, allocations of resources having the property that no agent can be made better off through further trade.  The artificial societies modeling approach allows us to explore such questions systematically and reproducibly.  In particular, we compare the performance of distinct classes of agents - neoclassical agents and various non-classical ones.  We find that neoclassical agents trading bilaterally are able to approach, over time, a price close to that associated with an optimal allocation.  However, when the agents are made progressively less neoclassical - when they are permitted to sexually reproduce or have culturally varying preferences - the markets that emerge generally have suboptimal performance for indefinite periods of time.

"Such results have important implications.  First and foremost, the putative case for laissez-faire economic policies is that, left to their own devices, market processes yield equilibrium prices.  Individual (decentralized) utility maximization at these prices then induces Pareto optimal allocations of goods and services.  But if no price equilibrium occurs, then the efficiency of the allocations achieved becomes an open question and the theoretical case for pure market solutions is weakened.

"We also investigate the effect of trade on variables studied in previous chapters.  We find that the _carrying capacity_ of the resource-scape is increased by trade, but so is the _skewness of the wealth distribution_.  More agents exist in a society that engages in trade, but the resulting society is more unequal.  Furthermore, the markets that result from our local trade rule generate _horizontal inequality_ - agents with identical endowments and preferences end up in different welfare states. Importantly, the welfare theorems of neoclassical economics do not hold in such markets."
(99)  footnote 8 "Below we show that the genreal effect of trade is indeed to _augment_ the carrying capacity."
(101-102)  "Agents move around the resource-scape following M, but are now permitted to trade with the agents they land next to, that is, their von Neumann neighbors.  When an agent-neighbor pair interacts to trade, the process begins by having each agent compute its internal valuations of sugar and space.  Then a bargaining process is conducted and a price is agreed to.  Finally an exchange of goods between agents occurs if both agents are made better off by the exchange.  The process is repated until no further gains from trade are possible."  
(102)  footnote 11 "... it is a kind of Edgeworth barter process."
(108)  "The immediate question for us - having banished the auctioneer and all other types of nonlocal information - is _whether our population of spatially distributed neoclassical agents can produce anything like an equilibrium price through local interactions alone.  It turns out that there is a definite sense in which they can!  However, the character of the equilibrium achieved by our agents is rather different from that of general equilibrium theory, for the markets which result produce less than optimal agent welfare - the potential gains from trade are not fully extracted - despite essential convergence to the general equilibrium price.  Furthermore, when we relax certain neoclassical assumptions (infinitely lived agents, fixed preferences) overall market performance is further degraded."
NB:  Does that mean working on neoclassical theories in the real world results in a falsely degraded market?
(113)  "This brings us to the so-called First Welfare Theorem of neoclassical economics.  This result is the foundation for economists' claims that markets allocate goods to their optimal social uses.  The theorem states that Walrasian equilibria are Pareto-efficient.  They are states in which _no realllocation exists such that an agent can be made better off without making at least one other agent worse off_.  But in statistical equilibrium

the First Welfare Theorem should be revised to say that a market equilibrium approximates but cannot achieve a Pareto-efficient allocation.  How close a given market comes to Pareto-efficiency
can be measured by the price dispersion in transactions. [Foley 1994:343]"
NB:  zero-sum game
(116)  "The result is of prime significance.  For whenever the actual trade volumes are less than the general equilibrium ones, agent society is not extracting all the welfare from trade that it might.  If the agents could coordinate their activities beyond their local nieghborhoods they could all be made better off.  here we see that _even though T produces exchanges that are nearly Pareto-optimal locally, the resulting market has far from optimal welfare properties globally."
(120)  "In what follows we make our agents more human, first, by giving them finate lines and, second, by permitting then preferences to evolve.  We shall see that the effect of these ew rules is to add variance to the distribution of prices and to modigy the price itself.  In fact, the mean price will follow a kind of 'random walk.'"
(123)  "Overall, the effet of tadie is to _further skew_ the distribution of wealth in society.  So, while trade increases the carrying capacity allowing more agents to survive, it also increase the inequality of the wealth distribution.  In this sense, there is a tradeoff between economic equality and economic performance."
(127)  "To economists, envrionmental pollution is the classic negative externality.  Externalities are important since their existence is an indication that an economuy is not achieving efficient resource allocation."
(129)  "In this case [of pollution transients] the artificial economy requires roughly twice as long to recover its statistical price equilibrium as it did to deviate from it."  
(136)  "Certain economists ascribe nearly magical powers to markets.  Markets are idealized to operate frictionlessly, without central authority, costlessly allocating resources to their most efficient use.  In this world of complete decentralization and Pareto efficiency, the only possible effect of government intervention is to 'gum up' the perfect machinery.  While this extreme view is perhaps little more than a caricature - and few would admit to holding it in toto - it is also, unfortunately, a postion frequently promulgated in policy circles, especially when there is no econometric or other evidence upon which to base decisionmaking."
(137)  "From the computational evidence above, we think that there is good reason to be skeptical of the predominant forcus on fixed-point equilibria.  Economies of autonomous adaptive agents - and of humans - may be far from equilibrium systems.  And, in turn, far from equilibrium economics might well turn out to be far richer than equilibrium economics."
(142)  "Recall from the discussion of cultural tags in Chapter III that the number of bitwise disagreements between two strings is the Hamming distance between them. So, the immune system - call it I _ searches itself for the substring closest to D in Hamming distance."
(153)  "The main point of the preceding chapters is simply this:  _A wide range of important social, or collective, phenomena can be made to emerge from the spatio-temporal interaction of autonomous agents operating on landscapes under simple local rules_."
"When the textbook assumptions were relaxed, the economy was pushed further from equilibrium.  From a policy standpoint, the analysis raises deep questions as to the allocative efficiency of unregulated markets."
(154)  "Over the preceeding chapters, we have built agent rules of movement, sexual reproduction, cultural transmission, group membership, trade, inheritance, credit, immune response, and disease propagation."
(160)  "But the mere fact that trade _can have_ the effects displayed above suggest that economic policy _can be_ a kind of population policy.  At the very least, artificial societies raise important policy questions.  And they may help answer some fo them."
(162)  "Mathematical social science generally adopts two assumptions.  First, agents can have different utility functions, but each agent's is _fixed_.  Second, every one is assumed to be doing the _same_ thing with its particular utility function - for example, maximizing it or maximizing its expected value."
(163)  "The deep point is that _our rules create the cliffs we drive off_."
footnote 6  "A particularly powerful example of this occurs in the model of Ackley and Littman[1992] in which they populate thier artificial world with a group of very capable but fiercely competitive agents and find that the population stays small and eventually goes extinct.  when less capable agents are released into the same environment, their population rises and lasts indefinitely."
(164)  "In all of the foregoing discussion we have been talking about autonomous adaptive agents interacting in, and with, a completely artificial environment, that is, one that follows rules that we devise.  It might be instructive to put the agents in a 'real' environment - that is to say, a physically realistic environmental model.  When the agents emit a pollutant it might be fed into an air-quality model, or groundwater toxification code, which would feed back into the agents' subsequent behavior, and so on.  Such systems could be quite useful in alerting us to counterintuitive, nonlinear effets (good and bad) of various regulatory policies or technological changes."

"With artificial agents in a simple environmental model it might be possible to grow a history that mimics the true history of some ancient tribe as it migrated in response to environmental changes.  At the time of this writing, we are collaborating with archeologists at the Santa Fe Institute and the Tree Ring Laboratory at the University of Arizona on a project whose aim is to grow the population dynamics and settlement patterns of the Anasazi from 400 to 1400 AD in the Long House Valley area of Black Mesa, using environmental and demographic data reconstructed by archeological methods."
(170)  "As a final example, then, we distribute agent preferences for like neighbors uniformly between 25 percent and 50 percent.  This adds more tolerant individuals to the previous run.  Will the final picture more closely resemble the modestly segregated outcome of animation VI-5, or the more completely segregated society of animation VI-6?  Animation VI-7 provides the answer.

"Adding this degree of tolerance is _not sufficient to generate_ desegration - indeed a highly segregated pattern endures.

"Now, had you been _shown_ this terminal pattern - the already emerged phenomenon - of segregation, you might well have concluded that virtually every agent had demanded that all neighbors be of its color.  Not so!  The question, then, is this:  How _little_ racism is enough to 'tip' a society into this segregated pattern?  In turn, is racial segregation reversible through 'invasion' by a handful of 'color-blind' individuals?  How much does it take to 'tip' things the other way?  Do these simple models help explain why we are so often surprised by the _true_ preference landscapes - for example, the Serb-Bosnian one - that burst forth when suppressive institutions are suddenly dismantled?

"If we want to understand political change, we need ways to study the 'match' between political institutions and the underlying preference landscapes.  When the match is good, there is political stability, but when the match is bad, frustration accumulates and there can be sudden releases of conflictual energy."
(177)  "Clearly, agent-based social science does not seem to be either deductive or inductive in the usual senses.  But then what is it?  We think _generative_ is an appropriate term.  The aim is to provide initial microspecifications (initial agents, environments, and rules) that are _sufficient to generate_ the macrostructures of interest.  We consider a given macrostructure to be 'explained' by a given microspecification when the latter's generative sufficiency has been established.  As suggested in Chapter I, we interpret the question, 'can you explain it?' as asking 'can you grow it?'  In effect, _we are proposing a generative program for the social sciences and see the artificial society as its principal scientific instrument_."
(176)  "In some areas, it may be that simulation _really is_ the best we can do."
(181)  "...20,000 lines of code that make up Sugarscape."

Notes from Between the World and Me

_Between the World and Me_ by Ta-Nehisi Coates

NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2015

ISBN 978-0-8129-9354-7

(7)  But race is the child of racism, not the father.  And the process of naming "the people" has never been a matter of geneaology and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.

(28)  My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.

(29-30)  Your grandmother taught me to read when I was only four.  She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation.  When I was in trouble at school (which was quite often) she would make me write about it.  The writing had to answer a series of questions:  Why did I feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher?  Why did I not believe that my teacher was entitled to respect?  How would I want someone to behave while I was talking?  What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to my friends during a lesson?  I have given you these same assignments.  I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your behavior - they certainly did not curb mine - but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness.  Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class.  She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicted the most sympathy and rationalizing - myself.  Here was the lesson:  I was not an innocent.  My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue.  And feeling that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans.  If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent.  Could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell?  The cities they built?  The country they claimed as given to them by God?

(30)  I was attracted to their [Black Panthers] guns, because the guns seemed honest.  The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary language - violence.

(32)  They [60s civil rights protesters] seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists who bombed them.  _Why are they showing this to us?_  Why were only our heroes nonviolent?  I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality?

(36)  Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I'd ever heard.  He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief.  If he was angry, he said so.  If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.  He would not turn the other cheek for you.  He would not be a better man for you.  He would not be your morality.  Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination. I identified with him.  I knew that he had chafed against the schools, that he had almost been doomed by the streets.  But even more I knew that he had found himself while studying in prison, and that when he emerged from the jails, he returned wielding some old power that made him speak as though his body were his own.  "If you're black, you were born in jail," Malcolm said.

(53)  The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation.  Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own.

(58)  I know it's nothing to you now, but I was from a place - America - where cruelty toward humans who loved as their deepest instincts instructed was a kind of law.

(66)  The truth of us was always that you [his son] were our ring.  We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote.  If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster.  Everything else was subordinate to this fact.

(70)  Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.  Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains - whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

(82-83)  Black people love their children with a kind of obsession.  You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.  I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made.  That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket.  It was only after you that I understood this love, that I understood the grip of my mother's hand.  She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine.  And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgement of invisible gods.  The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed.  The typhoon wil not bend under indictment.  They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all.  He was  a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws.

(87)  Damn it all.  Prince Jones was dead.  And hell upon those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter.  Hell for ancestral fear that put black parents under terror.  And hell upon those who shatter the holy vessel.

(98)  "We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren't any," writes Solzhenitsyn.  "To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law."  This is the foundaton for the Dream - its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works.

(137-138)  I have never asked how you became personally aware of the distance [from the Dreamers].  Was it Mike Brown?  I don't think I want to know.  But I know that it has happened to you already, that you have deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from other privileged children, because you are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country.  What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility.  It is your responsibility because you are surrounded by the Dreamers.  It has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair.  The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows.

(142)  Have you ever taken a hard look at those pictures from the sit-ins in the '60s, a hard, serious look?  Have you ever looked at the faces?  The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous.  They betray almost no emotion.  They look out past their tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond anything known to me.  I think they are fastened to their god, a god whom I cannot know and in whom I do not believe.  But, god or not, armor is all over them, and it is real. Or perhpas it is not armor at all.  Perhaps it is life extension, a kind of loan allowing you to take the assaults heaped upon you now and pay down the debt later.  Whatever it is, that same look I see in those pictures, noble and vacuous, was the look I saw in Mable Jones [mother of Prince Jones].

(143)  And she [mother of Prince Jones] could not lean on her country for help.  When it came to her son, Dr. Jones's country did what it does best - it forgot him.  The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.  They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery;  the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote;  the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs.  They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world.  I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.  In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers.  To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body.  It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.

(150)  Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind.  But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent.  And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself.  The Earth is not our creation.  It has no respect for us.  It has no use for us.  And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky.

(151)  The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.  The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.